


fractured moonlight on the sea

by QueenWithABeeThrone



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Amnesia, Ensemble Cast, Happy Ending, Mollymauk Tealeaf Lives, Other, Selkies, selkie!molly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-08-11 12:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16475591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/pseuds/QueenWithABeeThrone
Summary: For as long as Molly can remember, he’s felt as if something important was missing.or: Molly is a selkie who doesn’t know he’s a selkie.





	1. a drumming noise inside my head

**Author's Note:**

> title is from Florence + The Machine’s “Never Let Me Go”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is from Florence + the Machine’s “Drumming Song”.

Once upon a time, a fisherman lived in a small hut by the sea.

Once upon a time, he loved a woman who came from the sea, watched from a distance as a seal ducked behind a rock and came out a woman, eyes bright and laughing. He watched for three days, and on the third as she was away, he crept into her cave and took away a sealskin coat. When she came back, she could not find her coat, the one that would let her return home.

The fisherman gave her his coat instead, of worn and weather-beaten leather. He made her his wife, and kept her coat in a jar, magicked so she would not find it, for he knew the selkies’ curse: no love could keep them from the sea.

He gave her his home, gave her precious things and beautiful gifts, but her eyes grew dull and dark. This was the curse of the selkie: they could not live on land, not truly. They would always, always come home to the sea. That was inevitable, no matter how the fisherman tried to subvert her destiny, to keep her by his side.

One day, she found his jar. Magicked though it was, she knew what it contained, and did not care if it hurt her. She opened it, and went home to the sea, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.

And the fisherman never saw his selkie bride again.

(Once upon a time there was a selkie, who did not want to marry, who did not want gifts or precious things, who did not want to stay on the shoreline to keep a thief happy. Once upon a time, she did all three, and it broke her heart to do.

Once upon a time, there was a selkie bride, and she found her skin at last after long years of searching.

Once upon a time, there was a selkie, who stepped, bleeding and broken, into the sea, and shed her shoes and shift. She shrugged on her skin, and from one step to the other, she became a seal once more and came back home.)

Loving a selkie is a tragedy, always.

The selkie always goes home.

\--

For as long as Molly can remember, he’s felt as if something _important_ was missing.

Most of the time he can push it away, to the back of his mind. Whatever it was, it’s truly lost by now, and Molly finds that he doesn’t care about whatever it was to try and look. It must’ve belonged to whoever had his body, once, and so it’s nothing Molly concerns himself with. He left the grave behind, and with it left the remnants of the asshole’s life in the dirt. Where it belongs, he’s sure.

But sometimes the circus draws near a lake, and Molly finds himself pulled away from the tents to the waters. In the early days he had to be stopped from wading into the lake, because everyone was certain he would drown himself somehow, kitten-weak and broken thing that he was. In the early days the waters _pulled_ , and he would stumble to the shores and keep stumbling on into the water, into the shallow. He never walked further, because someone would pull him back, even as he struggled and fought.

But that’s early days, and these days Molly’s pretty good at keeping himself back. These days he waits till it’s nightfall, before he walks out to a pier, to the shore, and takes his shoes off. He doesn’t know why, but the water always draws him close. He kicks at the surface, watching the splash, watching the ripples.

“Are you okay?” comes a scratchy voice, and Molly looks back to see Toya, coming to sit next to him.

“I’m fine,” says Molly. “Just needed a bit of time to myself.” He loves these people, really he does, but when he’s closer to the water he always needs to spend time _there_. It’s something Mona and Yuli have goodnaturedly complained about, joking that he might’ve been a mermaid once.

“Oh,” says Toya. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

Molly shakes his head, and scoots over. “You can sit if you want,” he says. “I don’t mind your company.”

“Oh, good,” says Toya, doing as asked. Her legs are too short to reach the water, not like Molly, soaking his ankles. “Remember that coast town we went to, two weeks ago?”

Molly lets out a breath, and looks up at the crescent moon. “The one with all the seals, yes,” he says, bracing himself for a question about why he was talking to a seal like it was sentient. “Why?”

“I was wondering,” says Toya, quietly, “if—um, they had some pretty good treats. And I guess I wondered if you’d left a few over, maybe. I kind of. Really liked them.” She scratches the back of her neck.

“The little saltwater taffies?” says Molly, relieved. “No, don’t think so. Might have better luck if you asked the Knot Sisters, I know they’ve been hoarding sweets away from Orna.”

“I did, and they said you were,” says Toya, squinting up at him.

“They were lying horribly,” says Molly. “I was busy trying to train a seal to do tricks.” It’s not completely wrong, but he doesn’t know what to tell her. He doesn’t know how to tell her that one of the seals he saw looked at him with eyes that weren’t quite so bestial in intelligence as he thought they would be. He doesn’t know how to tell her that he felt _exposed_ , like the seal had known more about Molly than Molly himself did.

And he certainly can’t tell her that he wanted so, so, so badly to take off his coat, take off his shoes, take everything off and dive into the deep. He doesn’t even think _want_ is the right word. It’s more like something was calling to him, there, something that tugged at his very bones. That would just scare her.

“I know, I saw,” says Toya. She leans against his side and says no more for a few more minutes, and Molly doesn’t say more either. They have a big day ahead of them, anyway.

Toya goes back to the tents, after a while. Molly doesn’t go with her, but stays out near the water, looks up at the moon. He tugs his coat closer around himself, curls up underneath it.

Something in his chest aches, hollowly. Like there’s still something missing.

He just doesn’t know what.

\--

When Caleb was younger, his parents would tell him folktales. His mother had, once upon a time, been the daughter of a fisherman, and his father had instilled into his heart a healthy love of stories. All that combined meant that he knew about selkies, and knew how the stories always ended. _The selkie always leaves._

One of the books his father gave him was a book of fairytales. Caleb memorized all of it, and could tell the stories at the drop of a hat, even do the voices if asked. But, and he was a very curious and morbid child even back then, one of the stories that fascinated him the most was the story of the selkie bride.

“Why does she always leave, Mama?” he had asked his mother once.

“The selkie bride?” his mother said, kneading the bread. “Well. In all the stories my father told me, the fisherman never really asked her if she wanted him to steal her skin.” She took her rolling pin and flattened it out into a pleasant round shape. “She left because her heart belonged to the sea, and no one else.”

Magister Ikithon did not believe in the stories. He called them old wives’ tales, for fools and simpletons, not warmages like Caleb and Astrid and Eodwulf. Selkies were rare, he said, and they did not emerge from the sea as beautiful women to marry poor fishermen. They were shapeshifters, and they did not have a place in the Dwendalian Empire. He had Caleb burn his father’s book, to prove his loyalty to the Empire.

Caleb was young, and stupid. He did it gladly, believing what his teacher said. He was a man grown now. He could not afford to fill his head with stories, not when he had a duty to something real.

The stories burned up. So did his parents, later. So did that Caleb, young and stupid.

He still remembers the stories, even now. He does not tell them to anyone anymore, or at least he tries not to, but one day, near a coastal town, Nott leans against his side and says, “I ate a seal once.”

“Really,” says Caleb.

“Okay, I wasn’t the only one,” Nott concedes, “and really it was more I just ate the bits of it left over, and now that I think about it I think maybe only like, a teeny bit of it was actually _seal_ , but. Well. I ate a seal once.” She pauses, scoops a bit of stew out and jams it into her mouth. “For a bit some of us were pretty sure we ate a selkie? But turns out it was just a seal.”

“I don’t think you could _kill_ a selkie,” says Caleb, “only break its heart.”

“Selkies don’t have hearts,” Nott argues. “They’re savage little beasties that like to _eat people_ if they steal their skins. They turn into very attractive women, and fishermen try to lure them into their houses to make them their wives, and then after a while the selkies find their skins and then they _eat their husband_.”

“That is not the story I was told,” says Caleb, faintly. “The selkie bride did not eat her husband. She only wanted her sealskin back. When she had it back she walked to the sea and left a trail of blood from the hut to the waters.”

“Where do you think the blood came from?” Nott challenges, pointing her spoon at him.

“Her, from opening the enchanted jar,” says Caleb.

“ _Her husband,_ ” says Nott, her tone brooking no argument. “Don’t fuck with selkies, they will kill and eat you.”

\--

The circus breaks up.

The Mighty Nein pulls together.

For a while Molly’s fine. They don’t pass near a lot of bodies of water, on the way to Zadash. They pass a cemetery and they scare off some bandits with fake syphilis, but there’s no water bigger than a puddle or a pond on the way to Zadash, so Molly doesn’t feel much of an irresistible urge to dive into the waters.

But the underground river is a different story entirely. As soon as Molly hits the water, some part of him is pulled towards where the current goes. Where the current goes, the sea is, and Molly can feel the pull of it under his skin, tugging at that phantom feeling.

It scares him. He won’t lie. He likes it here, likes what he’s built of himself, even if there’s Cree at his heels with wide eyes saying a name he doesn’t want.

Fjord doesn’t notice, bless his heart. He’s too busy being embarrassed that Jester lifted him up out of the water almost effortlessly, like lifting a kitten. Molly clings on to the side of the boat for as long as possible, and is almost reluctant in dragging himself out of it.

Fjord doesn’t notice, but Beau does as she pulls him out of the water. “Not planning on throwing yourself in there, are you?” she asks as they row back to the rest.

Molly snorts. “I’m considering it,” he says. “You are very unpleasant.”

“And you’re obnoxious enough to make me want to jump into the water too,” Beau grumbles.

Molly chuckles, and doesn’t tell her. She knows enough about him already. They all do. Some things he has to keep to himself, and besides, he doesn’t really know how to articulate this longing. It’s old, older than he is, and for that reason alone it scares him. It must be something that had belonged to Lucien, this longing.

If so, Molly doesn’t want it.

\--

One of the things Caleb realizes about Molly is how _protective_ he is of his coat.

It’s a horrendously tacky thing, the coat. It’s covered in symbols, belonging to one deity or another, and colored like a toddler did the coloring. There are patches that clearly came from completely different kinds of fabric, and it makes him look like even more of a walking rainbow.

But when one of the goblins that ambushes them in the night while they are off to Barrelben tries to steal the colorful bundle, something seems to _snap_. Molly’s sword flashes and he cuts through the goblin and its friend with a snarl, and holds the coat close the rest of the night. As if he’s scared to let it out of his sight.

Come to think of it, Molly doesn’t seem to let just about anyone touch his coat, when it’s off of him. Fjord seems able to move it around, but then they are roommates. Caleb’s seen Molly draping it over Yasha, a few times, and then Jester after she had complained about the rain, but touch his coat and he hisses and snarls, like a cat trying to cling on to his pillow.

Chalk it up, he supposes, to one of Mollymauk’s many eccentricities. It’s a useful one, too, because Molly’s coat makes him stand out all the more, and a flashy purple tiefling in a coat of many colors draws more attention than a dirty hobo a few feet away from him. If he’s strangely possessive over it, well, Caleb has a necklace around his neck that he literally killed a man for, he understands wanting to keep certain things safe and on his person.

It’s while they’re sharing a watch near a small lake that Molly says, “Do you ever feel like something’s missing?”

“What do you mean?” Caleb asks.

“Do you ever feel,” says Molly, slowly, “like there’s something very important that you don’t have? Like it’s imperative that you find it, have it back, because without it you feel like you’re not whole.”

Caleb thinks of his mother’s smile, his father’s laugh, the stories they told him before he slept. “ _Ja_ , I do,” he says. “Why, do you?”

Molly breathes out, looking away from the fire and to the lake. “Not always,” he says, but there’s a longing in his eyes as he watches the ripples on the water. “Just sometimes.” He looks back to Caleb, the firelight playing over his face, shadows dancing across his features.

Caleb’s breath catches in his throat. He’s known Molly to be attractive since the day they met, he isn’t blind, but it had been offset by Molly’s general loudness and force of personality.

But looking at him now, in the firelight with his red eyes on Caleb and not the lake, he is _beautiful_ , eyes bright, hair almost silver in the moonlight. He looks almost radiant, and Caleb knows, with a leaden heart sinking into the pit of his stomach, that he does not deserve this. Should not know this about Molly, should not know the doubts he seems to keep to himself, behind his carnival barker’s smile.

“Do you know what you’ve lost?” Caleb asks, the curious child he used to be resurfacing for just a moment.

Molly shakes his head. “No, and honestly, I don’t want to know,” he says. “Whatever it was, it belonged to that arsehole who died two years ago. I’ve gotten along just fine without it.” But his eyes slide back to the lake, and the confidence drops for just a second, the _yearning_ so plain on Molly’s face that it hurts to see. Then he looks back at Caleb once more. “What about you?”

“Yes,” says Caleb. “And I want it back.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” says Molly, softly, sincerely, not prying for more details as Caleb half-thought he would. “And for you not to burn yourself out, trying to get it back.”

“I have already burnt myself out,” says Caleb, with a shrug.

“Then I don’t want you to do it again,” says Molly, cocking his head, the jewelry on his horns tinkling softly. “I’m starting to like you, Caleb. It’d be a crying shame to lose you.”

\--

They almost lose Molly.

\--

Molly stirs awake in an inn somewhere, swimming up to consciousness through a thick, slow sludge. Shady Creek Run, he thinks, that’s the last town he remembers, or rather that’s where they were going before shit decided to go completely sideways. There’s a firbolg with pink hair and pale skin at his bedside drinking tea, and Molly squints blearily at him. He stands out, is the thing, against the stained wood of the walls and the layer of grime that covers everything, including the bed.

“Good morning,” says the firbolg.

“Um,” says Molly. “Who’re you?”

“Caduceus Clay,” says the firbolg, putting his tea aside. “Deuces, if the name’s too long.”

“Mollymauk Tealeaf,” says Molly. “But it’s Molly.” He looks around and says, “Where am I? Where—shit, where are my friends—”

“They’re all right,” says Caduceus. “They went to see someone named—Ophelia, I think. They’ll be stopping by here for us, before we head on to whatever it is they’re planning to do at the Sour Nest.” He leans forward, tilting his head at Molly, and while Molly prides himself on being a perceptive person, something about the way Caduceus looks at him makes him wonder if he’s not staring into his soul. “What about you?” he asks.

_I almost died, how the fuck do you think I’m dealing?_

Molly shuts his eyes and breathes in, out. He’d been lucky. He’d been very lucky, getting out of that fight alive. For that much, he’s grateful.

“I’m not dead,” he says.

“Always good, that,” says Caduceus. “It’s something of a baseline, though, so besides that, you okay?”

Molly lets out a breath, runs his hands through his hair. Something aches inside him, something beyond the dully aching scars the battle left on him. “I just,” Molly starts, then stops. “It’s been a really bad week,” he says, “and it’s barely even started.”

“You were out for two days,” Caduceus says.

“It barely even started for me,” Molly amends. “Two _days_? Gods, I—fuck, the last thing I remember was the fight.”

“I figured,” says Caduceus. “You seemed really out of it when your friends came to my temple. You didn’t say much.”

Molly blinks at him. “What did I say?” he asks.

“Just _empty_ ,” says Caduceus. “They’ll be happy to know you’re talking, your friends all seemed worried that was the only thing you were saying.”

Molly exhales, long and slow. His heart hammers against his ribcage, rattling at the ribs like they’re bars of a cage. _Empty._ He’s pretty sure he didn’t die again. Did he? How would he know? His hand drifts up to the periapt hanging around his neck, fingers clenching around the pendant. It pulses in his grasp. “They have a reason to be,” he says, simply. Then, changing the subject: “If we found you in a temple, what are you doing out here with little old me?”

“You’re not very old or little,” says Caduceus, “and they asked. I volunteered, actually. You seemed about ready to pass out, and someone needed to be there when you came to.”

“Oh,” says Molly, a knot in his chest loosening, just enough that he finds himself breathing easier. Someone stuck around, to make sure he wouldn’t be alone. “Thanks,” he says. “Any idea when they’re getting back?”

“Not really, no,” says Caduceus. “They did say it would be quick, but they didn’t say how long they’d be out. Why?”

Molly looks around the room, really taking it in. It’s the kind of room he’s come to expect from shithole inns like this over his two years, honestly, grey and dusty and grimy, which makes his coat draped over a chair a welcome sight. He swings his legs off the bed and gets to his feet, and sends up a thankful prayer to the Moonweaver that he’s not kitten-weak, stumbling around on his legs. Just tired and achey, and empty deep inside. “I’d like to get to know you a bit better,” he says, “seeing as I think we’ll be stuck together for a while.”

“I’d like that too,” says Caduceus, with a kind, sunny smile.

\--

They get Fjord, Jester and Yasha back, and kill Lorenzo and the rest of his little gang while they’re at it too. Molly’s not one for vendettas, as far as Caleb knows, but even he can’t resist kicking the body a little once Caleb’s exploded the bastard’s head.

It’s as they’re unceremoniously looting the place that Caleb comes on something _soft_ in Lorenzo’s bedroom. It’s a pelt, he realizes quickly, made of fur so soft that it feels like touching a cloud. Experimentally, he throws it over his own shoulders like a mantle, but it weighs too heavy on him, and he sighs and takes it off.

Molly steps closer, his arms full of bottles of liquor. A sizable pouch hangs from his elbow. “Whatcha looking at?” he asks, leaning in close and squinting. “Huh. Is that a seal pelt?”

“What?”

“A seal pelt,” Molly clarifies. “From seals. The circus used to have a couple of seals around, they’re incredibly smart little bastards, but they were long gone by the time I was brought in.” He looks down at the pelt, eyes pensive, then says, “Can you run a Detect Magic on that real quick, or are you all out? It was a hard fight.”

“No, I still have a few spells left over, I can cast Detect Magic,” says Caleb. “Or Identify. Why, do you think this is magical?”

“I don’t know,” says Molly, with a shrug, eyes still fixed on the seal pelt with a strange look. “But it’s worth a look.”

So Caleb sighs, and murmurs a few arcane words under his breath. Detect Magic doesn’t need as much time spent to get it up and running as Identify does, so it only takes him a minute and a few gestures before he’s opening his eyes. The room around him does not glow very much, anymore, everything of magical value having already been stuffed into his pockets or into Jester’s bag, but Molly, as always, glows a slight sea-green. Gods only know why. It must be the blood magic, he supposes, although he may have to test that theory more.

He looks down at the pelt. It doesn’t glow.

“Well, once again, my friend,” he says, folding the pelt up and placing it back on the bed, “you are the only magical thing in this room.”

“Flatterer,” says Molly, but his tail sways dejectedly behind him. “You’re really sure?”

“I’m very sure,” Caleb says. “Why? What were you hoping to find?”

Molly huffs out a breath, rocking onto his heels. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just had this hunch, for a second—never mind, didn’t work out.” He shifts his grip on the bottles instead, flashes a bright grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Let’s go back and drink all this,” he says. “We may as well celebrate, after all. We _won_ , and we managed not to lose anyone to boot.”

“What was this hunch?” says Caleb.

“Just thought it might be magical, that’s all,” says Molly. “I’m not sure why, but hey, might be Jester or Nott would like it. Certainly seems like Nott’s size to me.”

And before Caleb can start forward after him and catch him by his sleeve, Molly’s walked away, back to the group.


	2. go with the sea change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is from Heather Nova's "Sea Change".

They ride out of Shady Creek Run with one more member than they came to town with, and Ophelia Mardun in tow to boot. Caleb cracks open the book he got from Trostenwald, so long ago—he hadn’t been able to sell it back, or pawn it off on some poor schmuck besides Yasha, who’d given it back to him on the basis that she already had another book for pressing flowers. It’s not a very compelling book, for something focused on rumors and fairytales, but it’s something to kill the time with while Molly tries to introduce Caduceus to the wonders of skein. Or get himself introduced to the wonders of Caduceus’ more exotic teabags. Caleb’s lost track.

Yasha is gone, having disappeared with the storm just two days past. Molly is as cheerful as ever, despite that, but there’s a false note to his cheer that rings too discordantly in Caleb’s head. And Molly is made of lies and bullshit, for this note to stand out means he’s rattled but won’t show it.

Caleb does not think about it too much. They’re all rattled, tired from the Sour Nest, tired from the Shepherds, just _tired_. They had come so close to losing one of their own, at a time they couldn’t afford more losses. If Molly wants to pretend everything is all right, then Caleb will let him pretend. He’s earned that much.

On a whim, and with the sealskin fresh in his mind, Caleb flips to the entry on selkies. Under the heading, a strikingly beautiful, nude woman stands on a beach, a sealskin in her hands. She smiles at an unseen person, soft and tender. Kind.

Caleb reads on. Most of the entry just confirms what he already knows of selkies, taking from stories scattered around the continent to build at least a coherent picture of what people view selkies. There are some supposedly first- and secondhand accounts, of children born to selkies, of their selkie parent and how they seemed to long for the sea. Those that were born of a sealskin thief and a selkie speak, in the book, of how their parent would sit near the water as though they’d lost something important in its depths.

He pauses, reads it back over.

_The selkie’s children recount that their parent would often need to be stopped, at times, from wading fully into the sea. On occasion, the family would be taken further inland, in which case the selkie would be drawn more to lakes and ponds, rivers and streams, any body of water at all. Always, however, the selkie would find their way back to the sea._

He looks up from the page at Molly, who’s pulled his coat off and fanned his tarot deck out onto the back of it, Caduceus in front of him. Molly picks one at random, as does Caduceus, and the two of them turn their cards over at the same time. As Caleb watches, Molly laughs, the sound like music to Caleb’s ears. Caduceus huffs out a laugh, too, a bass rumble from his skinny chest, and says something that makes Molly grin at him, _really_ grin like he usually does. Like he did before the Shepherds.

Something tugs at Caleb’s chest. He looks down and away from the two, eyes landing on a random passage: _A selkie knows, within their heart of hearts, that whatever love they have will always come second to the sea from which they came. They will always return, one day—but the degree of sorrow that causes depends on how they were drawn from the sea, in the first place. Many selkie stories, as well as a significant number of the firsthand accounts, note that the fisherman stole the sealskin first, and hid it from the selkie with intent to have them marry him. Other stories and accounts, however, make it clear that the selkie and her fisher love were truly in love, and the selkie’s return to the sea is treated as a sacrifice—she saves her lover from drowning in a storm, but at the cost of their life together. Rarer still are the tales of selkies who live their whole lives on land, but at the end of their lives go back to the sea._

Caleb looks up again, sees Molly looking his way. Molly flashes a smile at him, bright like fireworks in the night sky, and Caleb’s throat closes up on him.

He looks down again and reads another passage, at random, trying to put the thought of Molly’s smile, Molly’s eyes out of his head: _While selkies have oft been depicted in the tales as strikingly beautiful human women (and men), in reality, they come in as many varieties as we do. It is thus difficult to ascertain if one might be a selkie, but no matter what the race their land-bound form may take, all selkies who walk on land, with or without their sealskin, share the following characteristics: a longing for the sea that can sometimes border on near-suicidal for the selkies unused to land or the selkies that have lost their skins, an almost-irrational protectiveness over their clothes or their sealskins…_

“Oh, _Caaaaa_ -leb!” calls Jester, snapping Caleb out of his spiraling thoughts. He looks up from his book now, snapping it shut to see Jester coming back with Nott, the two of them grinning wildly.

“We found a good place to set up camp for the night!” Nott shouts. She holds up four dead rabbits by the ears and says, “And good eating!”

“We also found a really good stream so we can all take baths, ‘cause we smell worse than you do, Caleb!” Jester adds.

“I’m going first!” Molly calls. “I’ve needed a bath since last week!”

“Yeah, me too,” Fjord says, getting to his feet. “Been a rough time for us all, we really oughta take a break.”

“Where’s Beau, anyway?” says Jester as she comes closer.

“Trying to impress Ophelia, perhaps,” says Caleb, loudly, putting the book aside and spying Beau out of the corner of his eye, warming herself up to put herself through her paces. As he suspects, Beau almost trips once the words have come out of his mouth.

“Oh, _come on_!” she yells at him.

“He’s not wrong,” Molly calls.

“Fuck you, Molly, I wasn’t even talking to you!” Beau shouts, flipping Molly off.

“Fuck you too, Beau,” Molly shouts back at her, with a grin. Caleb looks away, his heart skipping a beat at the sight of it. This doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t. There are—Molly would not want him, anyway, even if it wasn’t inconvenient for Caleb to feel that way. Caleb wouldn’t blame him either.

So he puts those feelings away, in a box, and consigns them to the back of his mind. That is enough, that has always been enough. It should be enough now.

But he and Molly take first watch together that night, and the cold creeps into his torn and threadbare coat like a thief stealing into a house in the darkness. He shivers underneath it, curls up in himself and pulls his coat tighter around himself. He has been through worse chills than this. He can withstand a few hours of cold.

Molly, playing with his cards by the firelight, looks up. The glow of their campfire reflects off his red, red eyes, gives them an unearthly glow in the dim light. “You’re shivering worse than a drowned cat,” he says.

“No,” says Caleb. The word comes out with two more syllables than it necessarily should, _Nuh-nuh-no._ He scowls down at his hands, at his body that has betrayed him so.

“Yes, you are,” says Molly. He stands up and pulls his coat off, with barely any hesitation. “I’m not in the mood to argue with anyone over caring for themselves tonight, Mr. Caleb,” he says, “so here—it’s a great deal warmer than yours is right now.”

And he drapes the coat over Caleb’s shoulders. _His_ coat, with the embroidered moons and the bright rainbow of colors and the patches of a well-worn, well-loved garment. Caleb’s breath catches in his throat when he feels the weight of the fabric settling onto his shoulders, and he looks up to see Molly stepping back, as though impressed with his handiwork.

“There,” says Molly. “Isn’t that better?”

“ _Was,_ ” Caleb starts, then stops. “But this is yours,” he says, instead. “My own coat is serviceable enough.”

“Not tonight it’s not,” says Molly. “I have darkvision, I saw you shivering under it.” He sits down beside Caleb again, leaning a little more against Caleb’s side. Tieflings, Caleb very quickly finds, run hot—not so hot as to burn someone, but warm enough that Caleb finds himself thinking of wrapping his hands under warm bowl of his mother’s soup. “I don’t get cold easy,” he says, “I figured you might need it more.”

Caleb tugs Molly’s coat tighter around himself. He has to admit, it does feel warmer.

Although—he also has Molly pressed into his side. That, he thinks, is helping too.

If Caleb were any stronger, he’d take the coat off and give it back to Molly. If Caleb were any stronger, he wouldn’t be letting Molly burrow into his side, warm and cozy and so kind, the sort that Caleb does not deserve. If Caleb were any stronger he would not be here, surrounded by people he has come to care deeply for despite his best efforts, with someone he—would prefer to stay alive for the next few years settled next to him.

But Caleb is weak and selfish and foolish, and he finds he cannot let this go.

\--

The first time Molly ever hears the word _selkie_ , it’s in the Pillow Trove in Zadash, with Jester braiding his hair. A small pile of diamonds lies to the side, carefully sorted and counted—if one of them ever falls in battle, ever _dies_ , the diamonds are something of an insurance policy. It’s something none of them had ever thought they’d be putting together, but this mess with the Shepherds has certainly shifted some perspectives around, besides bringing a new cleric into their fold.

Not that Molly will complain. It might’ve taken him a while, but he does like Caduceus.

“—and Caleb shoved this seal pelt at me before he went off to do this library thing,” Jester’s saying, “and for like, a hot second, I thought it was a selkie pelt, you know, like my mom used to tell me stories about when I was really little—”

“What?” says Molly, startled out of his reverie and sitting up straighter.

“—but it was just a seal pelt,” Jester finishes, “so that was a bummer. Hold still! This is a really tricky part.”

“No, no, back up,” says Molly, tapping her knee. She sighs, and lets go of his hair as he turns to look up at her. “What was that earlier? Seal-something?”

“Selkie,” says Jester. “They’re people who can turn into seals! Or seals who can turn into people. My mama never really said which one it was, but she did say the shift could only happen if a selkie had their sealskin, and she was always kind of sad about that. And then she would tuck me into bed and kiss my cheek and tell me to go to sleep.”

“How would you know if someone’s a selkie?” Molly asks.

“Well, you kinda have to stick around and watch them take off their sealskin,” says Jester, as candid as ever. “And they’re supposedly super pretty, too. Probably not as pretty as my mom, though.”

“Besides that?” Molly prompts.

“Nothing, sorry,” says Jester. “Did no one ever tell you about selkies before? Ever?”

“I’ve—I’ve seen seals, but no, no selkies,” says Molly. Something itches in the back of his mind, pulls and _pulls_ , and Molly is half-afraid to look closer at it, to reach out and take hold and pull it towards him. It’s familiar, but it’s nothing Molly knows, and for that alone it makes his throat grow horribly tight with fear. Funny, he hadn’t been this scared even so close to death. “The closest thing I know are mermaids, we put on a show about those once in a town on the coast. How do you know so much about seafolk?”

“My mom used to tell me a ton of stories about seafolk,” says Jester, flopping back onto the bed. Molly clambers up to sit against the pillar holding up the canopy of the bed. Their tails entwine, in what Molly’s come to learn means something like sisterhood, means Jester has something important to tell him. This is Jester, so these things tend to range from actual important things to the subject of the declining quality of donuts. “She’s super-famous, y’know, so she hears a lot of stories, and she told a lot of them to me when I was a little girl.”

“And a lot of these were about selkies?” says Molly.

“You’re really interested in selkies all of a sudden,” says Jester. “Yeah, they showed up a lot. But like, a lot of the stories ended really sadly? For the selkie, anyway, because this stupid dumb fisherman would steal her skin and lock it up tight, and she’d be all sad and have to bear him children even though he’s super boring and she loves the sea more.”

“That is sad,” says Molly.

“I wasn’t done,” says Jester. “And then she finds her skin again! But because the fisherman is creepy too he put an enchantment on the jar he stuck it in that hurt her really badly, and so she had to drag herself to the ocean all bloody and sad. And then she threw herself back into the waves, and Mama wouldn’t tell me if she lived or not but I’m pretty sure she _didn’t_ and it’s _so sad_ , Molly!”

“Did she ever tell you any other stories besides that one?” Molly says, weakly.

“A few,” she says. “There was one about a selkie bride and a fisherwoman, but that one ended sadly too even though no one was creepy, because the selkie told her wife not to go out fishing but the fisherwoman had to go, because she needed to put food on the table, you know.”

“And what happened?” says Molly, dreading the answer.

“The selkie saved her,” says Jester, which is a pleasant surprise and not at all what Molly had expected to hear. “But she’d made a deal never to go back to the sea so she could marry her fisher. So she had to break that deal to save her, and they never ever saw each other again.” She sniffles, wipes tears from her eyes.

Molly wonders, wildly, what would happen if he took that seal pelt and burned it, right now. But Caleb’s Detect Magic hadn’t seen anything magical around it, and Jester seems certain that it’s not a selkie’s pelt, so it would just be a waste of good warm fur.

—why would he want to burn a seal pelt, anyway? That could still belong to someone.

He chews on his bottom lip, and almost misses Jester’s question: “What’s up with you? I didn’t think you’d be really into selkies or seafolk at all.”

“I just thought it seemed a familiar word, that’s all,” says Molly. The word rattles around in the back of his mind, nudging against things he can’t quite grasp, things he doesn’t want to grasp. “Didn’t pan out.” He shrugs and summons up his carnival barker’s smile. “Sometimes things just aren’t meant for you, I guess.”

“You sure seemed really interested in them besides just it being a familiar word,” says Jester.

“Maybe I’ll make up a story to tell about one,” Molly says, lightly. “My mother was a selkie, my father was a boor, and when I was five my mother tossed me into the ocean expecting me to know how to swim immediately. How does that sound?”

“Your mother needs to die walking into the ocean,” says Jester, with grave seriousness, and they’re spinning out the story from there. By the time Caduceus gets back with dinner, Molly’s built up a new backstory, involving selkies, a were-peacock, and a demonic deal gone horribly wrong.

It’s a very good story, if he does say so himself.

\--

They go back to Alfield, and Jester inflates Molly’s ego by proclaiming his penis to be the best one that she’s ever seen. Caleb does his part in keeping everyone on equal ground, by reminding them about the time Molly put breakfast on his dick.

They go back to Trostenwald, and free Gustav from prison.

It’s while they’re there that Molly slips away, for a moment, and Caleb follows after him. It’s not hard to track him, Molly isn’t even trying to hide his incredibly ostentatious coat, and Caleb has been around him for long enough to have some idea where he’s going.

Eventually, he finds Molly sitting on the shores of the Usteloch, his boots off, his eyes fixed on the waters. It’s a strange little habit that their carnie tiefling has, that he seems almost compelled to sit by the shore of every lake they stop near and soak his bare feet in its waters. Then again, Molly is full of eccentricities. A little compulsion to sit by lakes and soak his ankles isn’t really that bad, not when compared to puking up saltwater or stealing buttons or going unresponsive when burning people to death.

“May I sit, Mollymauk?” Caleb asks, and Molly startles.

“Uh,” says Molly, intelligently. He scoots over. “Sure! Sure. Certainly, you can sit. Did you follow me out here? I thought you’d be having drinks.”

“I thought you would be too,” says Caleb. “But here we both are, instead.”

“Did you at least bring anything?” Molly asks.

Caleb shakes his head, resting back onto his palms. Grains of sand itch under the bandages around his arms and hands. “No, _nein,_ sorry,” he says.

“That’s all right,” says Molly, pulling a knee up and looking out at the island, where the unnamed group that would become the Mighty Nein first took on a real opponent. “It would’ve been nice, but I wasn’t really expecting it anyway. I just—wanted to come out here.”

“You always do,” says Caleb.

“Hm?”

“When we are near bodies of water, you like to soak your ankles,” says Caleb. “The only time I did not see you do that was while we were in the swamp.”

“Swamp muck was hard enough to get off my boots,” says Molly, with a little smile. “I wasn’t about to get it all over my bare feet.” He lets out a breath, eyes still fixed on the blue of the lake’s calm waters. “Besides, I don’t know if _like_ is the best way to describe it. It’s more like I _have_ to.”

Caleb frowns. Molly hasn’t looked back at him, maybe to preserve some sort of mask for himself, but this is more truth than Caleb has ever known Molly to tell while not under a spell. And he knows this is the truth, because Molly isn’t smiling as he tells it, isn’t trying to distract or deflect. Instead there’s a pensive, thoughtful look on his face, the same look Caleb’s seen on him when he’s down at a bar by himself, staring into the depths of his ale without someone to chat up.

Caleb leans forward, off his palms, and fiddles with the bandages, loosening them from around his fingers. He shakes his hand to get the sand out from under the strips of gauze. “What do you mean you _have_ to?” he asks.

“It’s a bit like Nott and her shiny things, I think,” says Molly, running a hand through his hair. So it _is_ a compulsion, like Nott’s Itch, flaring up near the water. “I don’t know how to explain it, really. It’s just, y’know, sometimes she can’t quite help it and all you can really do is point her in the direction of an asshole who deserves to have a lighter wallet. Something like that.” He pauses, then huffs out a tired chuckle. “Except instead of stealing things, I have the urge to go swimming.”

“ _Swimming,_ ” says Caleb.

“I know, it’s ridiculous,” says Molly, head turning now towards him, his jewelry jingling softly. “I used to be much worse about it. Now I just stick my feet in the water, have a good long soak. Much more pleasant, and people kick up less of a fuss about it.”

“Will we need to worry about you almost drowning, before we go meet Jester’s mother?”

Molly shakes his head, picking up a pebble from the shore and standing up. He tosses the stone, and Caleb sees it skip across the water, leaving ripples in its wake before it finally sinks. “I’m good at swimming,” he says, “so don’t worry about me drowning.”

There are a lot of things to worry about, not all of them from Mollymauk, so Caleb lets the quiet, irrational fear of Molly drowning pass him by. He stands and picks up a stone as well, then tosses it out.

Instead of skipping, it sinks almost immediately.

“You’ve never done this before, have you?” says Molly.

“Was it not obvious?” says Caleb, deadpan, folding his arms. “We did not have a lake I could practice on, in Blumenthal.” Probably for the best, Caleb had never liked it when he couldn’t pick something up quickly when he was younger, and not being able to pick up skipping stones would’ve driven him up the wall.

Molly picks up another pebble, tosses that with a flick of his wrist. The pebble skips twice before it drops into the bottom of the lake, leaving ripples in its wake.

“The Knot Sisters showed me how to do this,” he says, wistfully. “They also threw me into a lake one time. I think they were disappointed I could already swim.”

Caleb stares at him, noting the little smile. It’s a lie, he knows, and it’s strangely a comfort—if Molly’s hiding something, even something fairly inconsequential, things are normal. Or as normal as they will ever be, for this group.

He lets it be. Let Molly have this much, they’ve had a long month or so.

He throws again, and huffs out a quiet curse when instead of skipping, the pebble just sinks straight down.

“You don’t throw it like that,” says Molly, suddenly, tossing a pebble up and down. “Watch, I’ll show you.”

Caleb watches him, all right. He watches the lines of Molly’s fingers as he holds the pebble with one finger hooked along the edge, the fading sunlight catching on his charms and his hair and giving him a soft glow, the spark of delight in his eyes as he throws, down and out, flicking his wrist _just so_. The stone skips across, _splish splish splash_ and sinking down, down, down. This is what he’ll remember, in the coming days: the satisfied grin on Molly’s face, the soft glow of sunlight on his hair, the sound of his voice as he talks about the best method of skipping stones.

The sight of him steals all the breath from Caleb’s lungs, leaves him staggering, drowning out of the water. He wants, oh, he _wants_ —

“—you get that, Caleb?” Molly’s voice snaps him back to reality, and Caleb shakes his head to clear away the vestiges of fantasy clinging to his mind, like cobwebs stubbornly clinging to corners.

“ _Ja,_ ” says Caleb, looking away from Molly. “ _Ja_ , I got most of it.”

“Show me what you’ve learned,” says Molly, encouraging.

Caleb picks up a rock, smooth and flat against his calloused palm. He lines it up with his index finger, leans back slightly, then throws it, down and out. It skips across twice before it sinks into the water.

“See, I knew you could do it!” Molly crows, turning to grin at Caleb. His eyes twinkle with delight, bright like stardust against a night sky, like sunlight reflected off the water.

“I had a good teacher,” says Caleb, heart beating so fast and so loud that he’s half-surprised Molly can’t hear it. Oh, _no_. “We should get back to the others. They’ll be worried.”

“Ah, shit,” says Molly, “I did lose track of time, didn’t I.” He steps closer, hand slipping onto Caleb’s elbow, and says, “Lead the way, Caleb. I’ll be right beside you.”


End file.
